Hemingway in LausanneLike many Anglo-American writers before him, Hemingway visited Lausanneand its surrounding areas many times, especially during his Paris years,and like many of them he used the Alpine landscapes of Lausanne as asetting for his fiction. Indeed, since the times of the Grand Tour,Lausanne had served as a crossroads and a place of inspiration for menand women of arts and letters. Painters, such as Turner, historians, suchas Gibbons, poets, such as Shelley and Byron, food critic, M.F.K. Fisher,and many famous American writers, including James Fenimore Cooper, HenryJames, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, and, of course, Ernest Hemingwayhimself have sojourned, lived, and worked in Lausanne or nearby. Lausanneand the surrounding areas are clearly associated with intense andextraordinary experience for Hemingway. As a journalist for the TorontoStar, he covered the international peace conference after the Greco-Turkish war, and later he visited the area with Hadley for winter sport.It was on the way to the Lausanne station that Hadley lost a valise withErnestâ€™s early manuscripts, and as reported in A Moveable Feast,Hemingway associated the area with the beginning of the end of hismarriage to Hadley. In his fiction, Hemingway set the end of A Farewellto Arms in Lausanne and the spectacular landscapes of Montreux only tenmiles away. Swiss landscapes also provided the backdrop for some of hismost memorable short fiction, including â€œCross Country Snow,â€ â€œAn AlpineIdyll,â€ and â€œHomage to Switzerland.â€

Conference ThemeWith â€œHemingwayâ€™s Extreme Geographies,â€ the organizers wish to prompt aconsideration of the ways the experience of space and geographyâ€”itsphysical, psychological, and emotional dimensionsâ€”informed Hemingwayâ€™swriting. Hemingway had an acute sense of space and its evocativecapabilities. One may easily recall many instances of this in his work:his claim in A Moveable Feast that he had to come to Paris to write aboutMichigan; the vivid description of the crossing of the Pyrenees in TheSun Also Rises; the evocation and subversion of masculine identity in hisAfrican or Cuban fiction and non-fiction; the charred landscape, clearstreams, and swamp of â€œBig Two-Hearted River.â€ Switzerland is similarlytreated in narratives such as â€œCross-Country Snow,â€ where Nick Adamsprobes the limits of geography and of physical and psychological balanceas a skier in the Swiss Alps and as an American father-to-be. By the sametoken, his autobiographical narration of the Paris years ends withconsiderations on marriage and train schedules, that is, on life, death,time and space: "when I got back to Paris I should have caught the firsttrain from the Gare de l'Est that would take me down to Austria. But thegirl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the firsttrain, or the second or the third.â€ Hemingway also wrote about thegeography of the bodyâ€”the way it imposes its own limits and topography bybeing marked, scarred, or gendered. Even Hemingwayâ€™s sentences, grammar,and syntax suggest the importance of the material space of the story andthe terrain of the words on the page.

ProposalsOrganizers encourage participants to interpret the conference themebroadly. We welcome proposals on all aspects of Hemingwayâ€™s artistic andexistential experience, but we are particularly interested incontributions that explore Hemingwayâ€™s penchant for intense experiencesin liminal spaces (physical and psychological) as a starting point forhis writing.

Topics of the conference may include but are not limited to the followingthemes:

Physical Geographies:

-Switzerland as a place of encounter and dis-encounter-Africa, Cuba, Switzerland, Spain, France, and the place of the â€œotherâ€-The Gulf Stream, Key West, Michigan, The American West-Ketchum, and the unhomeliness of home-Warscapes (WWI, Spanish Civil War, WWII)-Aviation, traveling-Boundary crossing (literal and figurative)-The bodily experience of space; the jubilant/sensual and the injuredbody-The geographies of sports-The gendering and the ethics of topography-The carnivalesque-Hemingway and the Romantic tradition

Internal Geographies:

The literary space:

-Hemingwayâ€™s sentences-The art of omission-Narrative lines and narrative interruptions-The space of Hemingwayâ€™s paragraph-A room with a view: the construction of aesthetics in Hemingwayâ€™s writing

The space identity (gender, racial, public):

-Remorse; or, the land of the past-Regeneration through violence-Masculine territories and the frontier of the â€œotherâ€-The construction of Authorship and the defense of authorial territory

Other issues:

-Materialism and idealismâ€”the world here and now and worlds beyond-Hemingway and religious sentiment-The crisis of reality and unreality of reality-Existentialism and mysticism-The sublimation of injury and the extreme spaces of experience-The experience of beauty and the sublime; or, Hemingway and the (post-)Romantic tradition-The extremes of the reception of Hemingway-Reading Hemingway in Africa, Europe, Asia

An Interactive Conferenceâ€”Overview of the types of panelsThe conference organizers are interested in creating a conferenceexperience that stresses interaction and exchange. For this reason, wehope to mix traditional three-paper panels and plenary sessions withworkshops and expert-led seminars. Of course, traditional panelproposals and individual paper proposals are welcome, but we encourageindividuals or groups of aficionados to consider proposing a panel or aworkshop.

All questions and proposals should be sent to the conference co-directors, Suzanne del Gizzo and Boris Vejdovsky, athemingway2010_at_comcast.net. PLEASE MENTION â€œHEMINGWAY-LAUSANNE-PPâ€ IN THESUBJECT OF YOUR MESSAGE. All proposals are due by Sept. 15, 2009.

Traditional Panels: Panel chairs can propose a theme and indicate themain directions they would like their participants to explore (we caneven run a â€œcall for papersâ€ for you on the conference website, if youwishâ€”just send us a brief CFP well in advance of Sept 15, 2009 panelproposal deadline so you have time to receive and vet proposals).Alternatively, chairs can propose complete panels with threeparticipants; such proposals should include brief descriptions of eachpaper as well as a statement about the panelâ€™s theme (approx. 500 wordswith names and affiliations of each participant).

Workshops: Workshops are meant to be a variation on the traditionalpanel; they should focus on practical issues and inquiries, such asstrategies for teaching a particular text and /or a session on workingthrough a particularly rich passage/set of passages in Hemingwayâ€™s work.Workshops can be organized around short papers, a set of questions orprompts, or a shared inquiry and can be proposed by one person or by agroup of people. As with the traditional panel proposals, the organizerscan run a â€œcall for papersâ€ for you on the conference website, if youwishâ€”just send us a brief CFP well in advance of the Sept 15, 2009proposal deadline so you have time to receive and vet proposals. It isalso possible to propose a complete workshop with participants alreadyselected; such proposals should include brief descriptions personâ€™scontribution to the workshop as well as a statement about the panelâ€™stheme (approx. 500 words with names and affiliations of eachparticipant)..

Paper Proposals: We are also happy to accept individual papers.Individual proposals should be aimed at 20-minute presentations in orderto allow for a minimum of 10 minutes discussion for discussion during thesession. Organizers will distribute papers in most appropriate panels andwill put in contact presenters and panel chairs. Send 250-word paperproposals including your institutional affiliation to conferenceorganizers by September 15, 2009.

NEW FORMAT! THE SEMINARIn addition, at this conference we will also be featuring seminars onparticular topics led by experts in Hemingway studies. The seminars arefocused, intensive discussions under the guidance of an expert on thetopic. A list of seminars will be advertised on the conference websitein Fall 2009 (including titles, descriptions, and seminar leaders).Conference participants may sign up in advance to participate in theseseminars. Readings will be assigned by the seminar leader in order tofocus and enhance the discussion during the session.